Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s top education advisor, Alan Bersin, thinks it is time to raise taxes to give more money to the state’s K-12 school system. According to the California School Boards Association website, Bersin recently gave a speech to the group in which he called for an end to the “gridlock” between the anti-tax forces and “those of us on the district level (who) are faced with absolute requirements for additional resources." Bersin called on the CSBA to help educate the public on the need for new taxes, praising them for "skilled leadership." (Did you forget, Mr. Bersin, that CSBA’s "skilled leadership" helped defeat your boss’ important reform poposals in the special election? Probably not.)

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Yesterday the the House overwhelmingly passed the Border Protection, Antiterrorism and Illegal Immigration Act of 2005 after years of doing virtually nothing, in a post 9-11 world, to protect our borders. Whether this excellent legislation makes it through the process and onto the President’s desk for signature is another story. To become law, it must survive a tough conference committee process and a US Senate where all good ideas go to die. Two local Valley Republican lawmakers, George Radanovich, and Devin Nunes, voted no. I’m at a loss as to why. I understand the pressure from the US Chamber of Commerce and Western Growers Association. Maybe Radanovich and Nunes they knew the votes were there and voted no to heed big agriculture’s call. We DO need a flow of labor into the Central Valley to handle a year round agricultural harvest, and the labor supply, due to the Minuteman project and other factors, was the worst we’ve seen here in many, many years. Still, does getting grapes off the vine or lettuce out of the ground really rise to the level of an issue like Homeland Security? I don’t think so. Our members of Congress have to get their… Read More

It’s Saturday. And Congress is in session. Worse yet, it’s a week before Christmas and Congress is in session. And Congress will be in session on Sunday. While this unfortunate fact is bad for most of us, it’s been good for newly minted Congressman John Campbell who was sworn in just one week ago.

One of the reasons that the Congress is still in session is immigration. The House GOP is bitterly split over the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 authored by Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner. The fight is over two issues: holding businesses that hire illegals responsible and guest-worker programs.

The bill has two sentences which seemingly appear to expand guest-worker programs but are in fact, merely a restatement of current law. However, some view this as an opening for the Senate to expand guest-worker. Others recognize that regardless of how tough the border security and law… Read More

I think today may be the ‘slowest’ news day in terms of reporting California political news since the inception of the online version of the FlashReport. I suspect we will be seeing more of these kinds of spare-story days as we get into the holidays. Political reporters and columnists put in a lot of time during this year’s special election, so it makes sense that they would be taking more time off – and this is on top of the fact that California’s politicians are also enjoying the holiday season.

Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of political news going on in the country (especially out of the Congress) — but the focus of this website is on California political news.

Today I will take an opportunity to draw your attention to some of the recent posts on the FlashReport Weblog. Of course, if you missed any of my daily commentaires, you can click here to review them all by time, and catch up on my attempts a being a cub-reporter/columnist.

* Last week the California Republican Party Board of Directors met with Governor Schwarzenegger to,… Read More

In this blog and other news sources, there is an ongoing dialog about which GOP legislators are conservative or moderate or liberal. I think it might be instructive to take an actual look at the recently released 2005 California Republican Assembly Scorecard. I write this because I took the time today to actually read the votes that the legislators are judged on for the card. The votes pretty fairly expresses a range of "conservative" fiscal and social issues, including minimum wage hikes, 2nd Amendment questions, gay marriage, taxes, illegal immigration, and the budget.

And after reading this, and looking at the votes and scores of our legislative delegation, it can be pretty fairly concluded the the Republican Senate and Assembly delegation are as a whole pretty conservative. Basically a 94% vote means the legislator disagreed with the CRA position once – and usually that was on the somewhat unusual issue of spaying/neutering of dogs. I… Read More

Having just recovered from the special election to replace Chris Cox with John Campbell in the 48thCongressional District wewill now have to turntheir sights to yet another special election to replace a US Representative in the 50th Congressional District, though thiselection results frommore unfortunate events. With the departure of Duke Cunningham from the House of Representatives after pleading guilty to federal bribery charges, on Thursday the governor has called a special election date of April 11, 2006 to elect his replacement. I am sure my fellow bloggers will have a lot to say about this race in the coming months.… Read More

If you didn’t see yesterday’s Union-Tribune front page story on the "other" Inzunza, it’s a must, a blockbuster when it comes to the ramifications it will likely have on next year’s 79th Assembly District race.

Nick Inzunza, mayor of National City and brother of resigned SD City Councilman Ralph Inzunza of stripper-gate fame, just had the county’s "newspaper of record" hand him his political future in a dead bouquet of black roses, kinda like those growing in front of one of his rentals.

The 79th seat, currently held by Juan Vargas, has one of the highest Democratic registrations in the state … it’s considered a cakewalk in November for the D winningthe primary … unless the Republican nominee gets to run against a slum lord.

Before yesterday, Mayor Inzunza was considered the Democratic front-runner for the seat. Some may say theU-T isn’t doing… Read More

It is rare that I have something positive to say about the functioning of government — be it federal, state or local. Generally speaking, government is sluggish, unresponsive and inefficient — both absolutely and in comparison with the private sector.

Here in the beloved county of my birth, there is an exception to the rule: the Orange County Clerk-Recorder. I’ll illustrate my point with a couple of anecdotes.

Earlier this summer, I launched a blog consulting service called BlogAtomic. Naturally, that meant setting up a Fictitious Business Name (FBN) with the County Clerk-Recorder. The first time I went through that process was in the early 1990s — and it was a pain. It meant driving down to the Santa Ana office (for all you non-OCers, county, state and federal offices are located in downtown Santa Ana — far from freeway off ramps and close to slow-moving surface streets).

Then, you’d have to leaf through one of several giant, alphabetically organized volumes… Read More